Why mending is not getting over something

Dr. Hinojosa, it's Amanda Bray. I'm in your English 1303 class.

She knew me from last semester. She wanted to know how I found her phone number. I told her I'd looked it up in the phone book at the dorm's front desk.

I'm awfully sorry to bother you on a Sunday, the night before class ... when our first draft of the research paper is due.

She was quiet. I had signed up to take another class because of her soft-natured presence. She was serious about writing and her tight ash blonde curls sat closely to her head, which had told me she was from somewhere far away. (If you're female and your hair doesn't try to touch God in heaven, it's a dead giveaway you aren't from Texas.)

I liked that she was from Chicago. All the professors at Baylor have to be practicing Christians, but I knew they didn't check too closely on political leanings. Her ideas in class felt bright and full of freshness. And she had liked my writing, and I liked anyone who liked what I wrote down and knew how to talk to me about it.

I've done all my research. I am fully prepared to write my paper, Dr. Hinojosa. I just couldn't seem to sit down and write it today.

She asked me to remind her what my topic was.

Sex offenders being given a second chance in society.

That's when hot tears began streaming down my face. I was bracing myself for her to yell at me. My prayer to God that afternoon was to help me write my paper, but instead I was flooded with memories: the orange shaggy carpet in our living room, the lazy boy recliner, the drapes drawn shut. It was a male babysitter, a teenager, a recluse. Left alone with me and my baby brother for hours in the afternoon. I knew what I had remembered that afternoon from 12 years ago had put me into a state of shock. I had cried, heaving into my pillows in hopes that no one would hear me down the hallway. I was trying to bounce back. But I couldn't. I had remembered something that was foggy, jarring and real.

Dr. Hinojosa, I can't write this paper. I just can't write about society giving second chances to sex offenders. The entire premise around my research is that our punishments are too harsh. I can't...

She interrupted me and offered to let me skip class tomorrow. She said we'd find some way for me to write my paper in a safe way, or we'd find a different topic together. She said I wasn't the first student to have memories rise to the surface like this. She said to come by her office when I felt able, and she made sure I had the phone number to the counseling services on campus before we hung up.

As a student worker at the Baptist Student Ministries (BSM), my job was to be a willing and able "gopher." I can go for anything, any time. I delivered items across campus a lot. I helped prepare for events. I worked on mailing lists. I stuffed envelopes. Even though I wasn't a Baptist I'd really liked the people at the BSM. They were calm and quiet, a marked difference from the high-strung charismatics I'd grown up around. Their gentleness suited me and is probably why I was willing to talk to a female minister when the office manager Dorothy felt that something wasn't quite right with me.

Her name was Amy. We borrowed someone's office because I said I didn't feel comfortable talking out loud in public. I told her what I had remembered, of what happened with the babysitter and never, not once, telling any adult about it. It was such a foreign memory to me that I almost didn't believe my own remembering. But instinctively I knew it was true. Because at the moment it was shocking, and I was sobbing into the arms of my friends that evening, it made a lot of things about me make sense.

My conversation with Amy was the first time in my life when I wasn't told to just get over something. She believed me, she explained the complexity around what I had remembered and how this wasn't something that would just solve itself. She said it affects children in very deep ways, and it probably influenced a lot about how I grew up and who I am today. I believed her, but mostly I was in shock and moved by the kindness of her listening.

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I'm sure some may read this story and think, "Well, of course you shouldn't be expected to 'just get over' something like that!"

But that's not the culture I was raised in. If I hadn't felt convinced by the BSM leaders' concern for me, I would have done what had been expected of me my whole life. I would've squeezed my eyes tight, bent over with a fist into my stomach and swallowed hard until the memory was gone.

Looking back now, I don't have a sense of why I opened to the memories that rose to the surface that day—or why I continued reading, learning, even taking social work classes, to try to understand what happened to me when I was 6 years old. I knew my parents weren't going to be talking to me about it. They were quiet on the phone when I said I had talked to a Baptist counselor. They asked no questions on that first call, and no questions ever again. But I do remember one thing clearly:

I knew the truth—however traumatizing and frightening—was shining light into my life in a way nothing else had before.

At the age of 19, Mending became a constant theme ebbing in and out, and I've learned that mending begets mending.

I started to trade out the "getting over it" attitude I'd been fitted with in life (dissociation was a running family joke).

Looking back, I understand to a complex degree that getting over the things we feel can cause memories and even entire parts of ourselves to disappear completely.

But this time, I wanted to understand what would happen if I tried to get an answer for every question I had.

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